On Women, Bodies, and Nation: Feminist Critique and Revision in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The Griqua are an ethnic group within the larger Khoi population of South Africa. They have mixed race origins resulting from relations between the native Africans and European colonisers dating back to the seventeenth century and aligning them with the coloureds of the apartheid era. Andrew Andries Stockenstrom Le Fleur, often referred to as the Reformer, led the Griqua rebellion against the British in 1898 and the 1927 trek from Kokstad. 2. David would also like to include, against his narrator's wishes, Krotoä-Eva, the first indigenous woman to appear in official Cape records. Unlike Baartman, Krotoä ultimately has a minimal presence in the text; however, she has also achieved iconic status in South Africa and her inclusion at all in Wicomb's novel is significant. See Kai Easton's article ‘Travelling through History, “New” South African Icons’ for a consideration of Krotoä, as well as Baartman, in relation to David's Story. 3. Numerous scholars have written about Baartman, colonial discourse on the Hottentot, and the Hottentot as icon. For example, see JM Coetzee's White Writing (1988), Saul Dubow's Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (1995), Sharpley-Whiting's Black Venus (1999), and Sander Gilman's essay in ‘Race’, Writing and Difference (1986). Baartman's story has also been fictionalised in Barbara Chase-Riboud's novel Hottentot Venus (2003) Chase-Riboud, Barbara. 2003. Hottentot-Venus: A Novel, NY: Doubleday. [Google Scholar], the title poem of Elizabeth Alexander's debut collection of poetry The Venus Hottentot (1990), and Suzan-Lori Parks's 1997 play Venus. 4. Baartman died at the age of twenty-five from small pox and alcoholism, five years after agreeing to exhibit her body in exchange for money and a return trip home to Cape Town. She was not the only African woman put on display in Europe in the nineteenth century but has become the most famous, due largely to Cuvier's work. Baartman's jarred remains were exhibited in Paris's Musee de l'Homme along with a plaster cast of her body until 1974. Her remains were finally returned to South Africa for burial in 2002. 5. The MK refers to the Umkhonto we Sizwe (translated as Spear of the Nation), the guerrilla military wing of the ANC, established in 1961 when the ANC split from its non-violent past in order to become ‘the fighting arm of the people against the government and its policies of race oppression’ (ANC 2006 African National Congress (ANC). 2006. Manifesto of the Umkhonto we Sizwe. Official Website of the African National Congress. 7 July <www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/manifesto-mk.html> [Google Scholar]). 6. Steatopygia, a genetic characteristic of Khoi women, is a high degree of fat accumulation in and around the buttocks. It is sometimes accompanied by an elongated labia. These bodily features, pathologised by Europeans, rendered Saartje Baartman a spectacle as the Hottentot Venus. 7. To readers of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, this scene starkly contrasts Edna Pontellier's discovery of and claiming a sense of power and sensuality in her body through learning to swim. Wicomb here may be criticising the trope of ‘awakening’ that Chopin's text established as central in the western feminist literary canon but that cannot accommodate the complexities of race and the postcolonial condition.